In a piece in the New York Times Alaa Al Aswany, author of The Yacoubian Building, writes about the admiration of many Egyptians for Barack Obama and their subsequent disappointment because of his failure to criticize Israel over Gaza. Al Aswany appeals in passing to the requirements of human rights and international law. He also writes:

We ... wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation.

The trouble is that this is presented by him in the way it often is by critics of Israel - that is, passing over or fudging the point that the right of resistance does not include a right to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity, as Hamas patently does. Even those resisting tyranny or occupation are prohibited from the deliberate targeting of civilians. On war crimes, I have given the relevant sources in Part 3 here. For crimes against humanity, the Rome Statute of the ICC makes it clear that this prohibition applies not only to fully-fledged state actors but also to organizations and movements. At Article 7.2 (a) it reads:

"Attack directed against any civilian population" means a course of conduct involving the multiple commission of acts referred to in paragraph 1 against any civilian population, pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack. [My italics - NG.]

About Me

Jeff Weintraub is a social & political theorist, political sociologist, and democratic socialist who has been teaching most recently at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, and the New School for Social Research, He was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University in 2015-2016 and a Research Associate at the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research, Bryn Mawr College.
(Also an Affiliated Professor with the University of Haifa in Israel & an opponent of academic blacklists.)